My wife built the Treant deck with all the cards she received upon starting the game and then what she got from doing the daily stuff. She had to disenchant some cards from other classes, but she made a useful deck with starting stuff.
So does the other game out there.
Either you spent time grinding or pay money for instant benefit.
By me right now. Check the top decks of Legend (not the ones at ~50% win rate like the simple pala decks). E.g. the rogue is filled with legendaries. A new account can not play them; it’s NOT a “free account” thing though; I mean if they play for 1 or especially 2 years non-stop obviously free accounts can get any card for “free” anyway.
The devs try to leech money from old dedicated players, and those players have Egos.
If you tell them their time and money spent has no unfair advantages they whine.
Treant druid have more than 60% win rate and it is cheap.
New/returning players now have so many free items compared before.
What about those who are making money during the time they are doing an activity not work related?
They still have the opportunity cost of not spending that time to earn more money.
Opportunity cost is a real thing in economy to consider. It’s in the accounting, it’s in entrepreunership, it’s in your typical economics 101 curriculum.
So if you’re playing Hearthstone while earning money at the same time, you’re actually losing money because you’re not earning more money.
Not that it matters much for this discussion…people need entertainment and are willing to pay (or at least not earn more) for it
What if i have enough though for the rest of my life and i am retired? Your argument sounds more like greed than being practical. You can’t take your wealth to the grave.
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Absolutey, which is why I said it doesn’t matter for this discussion:
You’re speaking of an “Inverted S curve”, a curve which explains people’s choices between more work or more leisure.
There comes a point in everyone’s life when working 1 additional hour per day to earn more becomes less valuable than leisure time.
So you’re absolutely right. This is a blind alley unrelated to the topic.
IMO this is the most relevant answer in this topic. I still feel the same way, which is why I enjoy playing standard. I relish in disenchanting old unusable cards and investing the dust into meta decks which I encounter on the ladder and which seem to resonate with my play style.
And then winning with it. It feels great. It’s transformative experience. It’s a constant phoenix cycle of death and rebirth. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
In this context it doesn’t say much, because it does NOT make new accounts equal to old or paying accounts and they remain blatantly weaker in general.
For instance last patch there was a domination of a rogue variant that had a ton of expensive legendaries; or there was a domination of Highlander decks that are also blatantly expensive in dust; even this patch the Sludge Warlock meme isn’t the cheapest because it has a few Legendaries (though to be fair not extremely (the problem is mainly that it is OP in that case)).
show your work please
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New player needs $200 to have a collection deep enough to play whatever class and deck they chose to any day.
But if you only aiming at play 1 or 2 class, you can certainly do it completely free.
Beyond that, say you want to be able to switch between 4-5 classes (and multiple deck within a class), you might need to make some modest investment, some welcoming bundle are a pretty good deal, perhaps the current tavern pass or mini set, which would set you back something like $50 to $60, like a regular new game.
Also, i recommend new player to focus on arena the first few month. Doing quest to help you gather the 150 gold for entry and focus on arena to play all kind of card you don’t own while slowly building your collection.
Let us not derail from the initial topic
“New Player needs $200 to play Standard from scratch”
Other thing is - it was always like this.
You had to either grind to get those packs or pay to buy them. No other way around. Whenever you started, you had limited collection, no gold, no dust.
Now you are getting free deck with several legendaries, which you can dust if you want. You are getting more gold from tavern track. You are getting tons of resources people did not get before.
When I started I think you were capped at 100gold/day from winning games (which I never got, as it required you to win 30 games, so play in average 60 games) + dailies, which were 40-50 gold/day and one weekly, which was 150(?).
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My theory is if you play daily / weekly / do the quests, then a free account has approximately all the cards if they play for at least ~1 year including 1 rotation (assuming Standard) (assuming they do it correctly) (e.g. no dusting cards unnecessarily or excessively).
Though I may be overvaluing that concept since I haven’t seen it in action (I’ll know more when I see it personally after the rotation).
New player needs $500 to get a good start in Hearthstone 
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New accounts can get legend for about 400 dust right now
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I am rather new and don’t need money. I may buy in later though.
Depends how you look at it.
At my current level (playing since Lich king expansion) I struggled to have enough dust even after dusting everything rotating. After first year I had I think around 5k dust, next year around 10, the year after 15k, 20k etc. So first few years I usually did not have enough dust to craft more than few legendaries per year and at the end of the year I had hardly enough to make some epic cards.
Last 2 years or so I have more dust than I even need (i.e. at the end of year I still have some left and I have 15k dust in "dust everything more than you need), but it was not the case previously.
My friend, who is playing since 2017 as well is still struggling with dust even after dusting everything from previous rotation.